


Small Inventions

by mumblybee



Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-10
Updated: 2016-09-10
Packaged: 2018-08-14 04:03:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7997881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mumblybee/pseuds/mumblybee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is no place in the work of an assassin for the heavier side of grief, for the inconvenience of motionlessness and tears. Grief becomes rage and rage becomes blood catching in the mechanism of the (wonderful, awful) hidden blade, drying on the insides of his wrists where the leather has left dark marks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Small Inventions

Leonardo knows the moment Ezio arrives at his door – knows more firmly when Ezio can't seem to find any words, when he steps over the threshold and crumples, when he sobs into Leonardo's shoulder like a child – there is no longer any place for Ezio Auditore in this world. No place for the laughing eyes and carefree grin of the young man who dutifully carried his mother's paintings back home, who responded with (mostly) polite skepticism to the idea of anyone wanting to be an artist.

And there is no place in the work of an _assassino_ for the heavier side of grief, for the inconvenience of motionlessness and tears. Grief becomes rage and rage becomes blood catching in the mechanism of the (wonderful, awful) hidden blade, drying on the insides of his wrists where the leather has left dark marks.

Sometimes, in Venezia, Ezio comes to Leonardo's door almost giddy with triumph. He speaks in hungry, excited tones of the progress he's made, of the men he's brought down. He refers to them mostly with revulsion, these names on his ever-growing list – but now and then there's a flicker of fear.

And sometimes he comes to Leonardo's door (head low, hood up) with fear radiating off of him in waves, like the stench of the canals. (He once hid from an archer for hours under a bridge, he tells Leonardo one night. It had been late at night when he'd finally dragged himself from those corpse-fed waters and stumbled to find a doctor who would unquestioningly dig the point of an arrow from his shoulder. He shares these stories only when asked about a scar here or a limp there, and he does not tell them with any discernible emotion.)

One memorable summer evening he comes to Leonardo's door covered in blood and half-supported by one of Antonio's thieves – a bright-eyed, foul-mouthed girl who Leonardo later finds out is named Rosa. She curses viciously at Leonardo when he does not immediately move aside to let them in. She curses at Ezio, too, calling him all manner of names as he sinks drowsily into a chair, blinking slowly at them both but saying nothing. She and Leonardo work at stripping off the soaked robes and laughably cheap armor, fumbling for far too long with blood-slick leather straps. (Leonardo makes a note to look into improving those.)

Rosa curses some more after they've finally found and treated the source of the bleeding – not a stab wound as Leonardo had feared, but a nasty slash across the stomach, long but shallow. (He revises his earlier note to include armor design in general.)

"Here," she snarls, and holds out a tattered, grimy scroll. "This is what he just tried to kill himself for."

She turns away in apparent disgust as she drops the scroll on Leonardo's work table, where it sheds some of its grime onto his sketches. He should be angry at this, but Venezia's great and feared _assassino_ is sleeping half-dead in his favorite chair and Leonardo cannot seem to summon anything but exhaustion in response to that.

" _Grazie_ ," he says faintly, lifting the codex page and unfurling it like an afterthought.

Rosa snorts but says nothing, only drags a chair over to Ezio and drops into it. "So you are his artist," she says, and it's not a question, so Leonardo doesn't answer. (He thinks, with a touch of conceit, that he probably does not have to –  he's come far from those first struggling years in Firenze, made a name for himself in that city and this one. And he knows of Antonio, the man to whom Ezio seems to report these days –a man who sometimes refers to himself as an art collector, which Leonardo supposes is technically correct.)

The scroll's coding is laughably simple this time, albeit slightly blood-spattered. Leonardo glances over to where Ezio appears to already be dreaming, his fingers twitching into fists. And then he spreads the codex page across the table – damn the sketches, they're ruined anyway – and gets to work.

Rosa doesn't seem to find this worthy of cursing. Instead she stands up and rummages around the workshop until she produces a bottle of wine given to Leonardo by a patron, drinking about half of it in the hour it takes Leonardo to finish untangling the code. It takes another hour still for Ezio to wake, and when he does his mouth spills apologies until Rosa encourages him to fill it instead with wine.

They don't leave until sunrise (Ezio limping determinedly, Rosa swearing cheerfully at him), and Leonardo doesn't mind, although he can't seem to remember when exactly he decided to make harboring fugitives a habit.

_Of course you remember_ , his own mind chides him later. _When Ezio Auditore first showed up_ (beautiful, brutal, broken) _at your door_.

But if it had not felt like a choice then, then it especially doesn't feel like one now. Not when Ezio comes to him so often in search of sanctuary or a sympathetic ear, arriving anything from downtrodden to delighted. Not when Ezio inevitably falls to dreaming as Leonardo works, as though his body has learned to snatch at any small moment of peace. Not when he sighs and mumbles apologies in his sleep (to his brothers, his father, the world? Leonardo does not know). _Mi dispiace, ho provato, ho provato..._

He repeats this so often in his dreams. _I'm sorry, I tried, I tried._ There is no place for such childlike grief in the work of the _assassino_ , but it seeps out anyway through the cracks of whatever chest Ezio has tried to lock it in.

Leonardo drapes a blanket over Ezio absentmindedly one afternoon after he's finished another codex page (evidently obtained with much less drama this time). He slips away upstairs to work on a painting, and when he returns Ezio is gone, the blanket left clumsily folded on the chair. Leonardo pauses in the doorway, smiling faintly at the blanket's mismatched corners.

So there is no place for Ezio's grief. So there is no place for the man himself. If the world truly holds no place for Ezio Auditore...

Well then, Leonardo thinks, he will just have to keep inventing one.


End file.
